10 Responses

I suggest you carefully read these “useless” documents (The Constitution). The United States has done quite well following this blueprint. Disaster strikes where we have abused the Constitution (for example; the Federal Reserve).

steve – The operant term in the above offering is “complicated” and there are many more variables that figure into the discussion than have been addressed, that make the entire point of the article even more complicated. The fact that the status quo that has arrived out of our noble experiment, is little more than a cob-job reflection of various selfish interests working, over time, for their own benefit, within a framework that was meant to be a guide for fair and equitable governance, just shows us that our reality no longer reflects those lofty goals .

We were an agricultural nation of a bit over 4 million when we came into being, and already the forces of wealth accumulation were manipulating the economy to assure their own well-being , while avoiding some of the more unsavory realities that were occurring at the time, to their French counterparts. It is , perhaps, what was happening to the heads of the French aristocracy that helped to slow the process of plutocrification, and gave us our perceptions of freedom, that today seems to be moving at light-speed to pound the last few nails in the representative democratic coffin, as the uber-rich (who know how bad things are going to get in the complicated world they have allowed to grow like an untreated cancer) gathers as much as they can while the getting is good. They even have a literary (using that term in its widest application) work (Ann Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”) that inspires them to accept that the world is going to collapse, and that they, in some heroic John Galt style, should prepare for what their non-participation in any attempt to address the complexity of the problems their manipulation of the world economy caused, and are going to be brought down on the rest of us. They are bailing out, after having sucked the planet dry, and are planning to sit out the conflagration they have caused (provided they haven’t yet poisoned the planet to the point where it will kill us all), all to pick up the pieces left after the rest of us thin out fighting over the last scraps they have left on the world plate, all just to start the game all over again. Those who do not understand the issues (and I assure you the uber wealthy do and are using that knowledge against the rest of us), are in for one rude awakening when the you know what hits the fan.

Our government was never designed to “run the economy”. Our founders knew better than to grant such power to a central government. As Steven suggests, the template isn’t the problem; we just haven’t been adhering to it.

Jason – The government exists to protect our rights, like the right to not have a self selected few, in the so called private sector, structure everything to serve only them. When the government allows that kind of power to become absolute, that power corrupts absolutely. When they construct a complicated system to hide what they have done, facilitate what they are still doing, and sell it to the masses using cheesy simplistic easy to swallow contrived doctrine, then it becomes a conspiracy. The government isn’t the enemy, the people corrupting it are the enemy, especially the very rich, who use the government to further their cause, when they control it, and condemn it as the enemy that must be castrated, when they don’t.

@iknowtruthismine…actually, it’s not complicated at all. As I mentioned earlier, there is a simple blueprint to follow. As Jason points out, a bureaucratic central govenrment will make it quite complicated. Not sure why you bring up (Ayn) Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, she rails against the socialist/communist fictional world in Shrugged and critically faults government bureaucracy for causing failure.

steven – If you are going to continue to filter your entire dogmatic narrow political rationale using Ayn Rand inspired libertarian rationales, and feel a need to explain what she really meant, then you are going to have to understand that many of us, in our impressionable youth, got our hands on “Atlas Shrugged”, when it was hot off the press (I suspect that that was anywhere between 20 and 40 years before you were born), and being sixteen years old, we were duly impressed enough to read every scrap of drivel she ever wrote (including her very bad play, “The Night of January 16th”). If you think that a political and social theorist, who has spent his last 50 years fending off assaults to their intelligence by each successive wave of impressionable youth to come along and share the “truth”, that most of us saw through for the flawed, contrived, inflexible doctrinaire, justification for allowing people to steal from their fellow Human-beings, needs to be ‘schooled’ in something they have spent their entire life fighting against, then you are sadly mistaken. Blind dogma, that does not leave wiggle room for pragmatic concerns, justifies the worst aspects of “Social Darwinism”, and is dependent on a large portion of society living in subservience to those clever enough to gather more than their fair share (like the 1/79,000th who in our society own fully 1/2 of all wealth, because they constructed the mechanisms to steal it), will not encourage us to bat the same old shuttle-cock over the net anymore.

@iknowtruthismine…I prefer to have a discussion with someone that does not pretend to know it all (remember the man standing behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. . .) I look for the common sense solution. Yes, you can keep it simple and follow the constitution. You don’t offer solutions, you just criticize and posture. Also, you brought up Ayn Rand in these comments and unless you are James Joyce I doubt you could call her work drivel. Take a look at Modern Library’s Top 100 Reader List. Her book is #1.

Steve – I prefer to have discussion with someone who has a modicum of knowledge, a smidgen of compassion, and a workable ethical base, but these forums keep attracting the opposite kind of people, who think simple formulaic solutions exist that can fix the complicated problems that have arisen over our two hundred plus year history. The institutions that have come into being have been cobbed together as we went along, and the influence of wealth has exercised (as they do in ANY society that has ever existed) to make those institutions favor them, at the cost of the rest of society. We are now at a point where there has to be a shake-out, to re-order our priorities, or we will become a wealth driven plutocratic state, instead of what the more idealistic of our founders envisioned.

As to your demand that I offer solutions, I think it incumbent that we first cover the fact that so many complacent ignorant distracted citizens are disinclined to even face the fact that we have serious and complicated problems, before we confuse them more with the complicated and, of necessity, drastic steps that will have to be taken to once again make the “We The People” of constitutional fame, the preeminent focus of individual and governmental concerns.

I suggest you look at issues the way a 3rd grader would. Yes, I prefer this simplistic approach. The 3rd grader will almost always provide you with the common sense answer while the Phd will need months of research, endless discussion groups, isolated pondering and they will end up telling you the problem is too complicated to solve.

Gee Steven, how could I possibly argue against someone who thinks the best way to fix complex problems deliberately made so, over our 200+ year existence, by lawyers, whose job it is to make things complicated for the benefit of wealth driven elites they serve (and aspire to be) than to turn off my brain and adopt the naivete of an eight year old? Why don’t we kill all the scientists while we are at it too, as they have exceeded the level of understanding necessary to function rationally in the reality you propose? Please, don’t insult my intelligence with any more of that, the nation does not deserve to be dumbed down anymore than it already has been.